1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to data duplication, and, more specifically, to optimizing device and media server selection for backup image duplication.
2. Description of the Related Art
Duplication is an important part of enterprise backup systems. An enterprise may employ duplication to improve redundancy for important backup images and for supporting disaster recovery scenarios.
In an enterprise backup environment, data can reside on disk or tape repositories, each of which may be accessible from one or more servers on a network. Tape drives typically reside within tape libraries, which are often storage area network (SAN) connected peripherals in environments where there can be thousands of servers and many storage devices. Media servers typically manage tape libraries and provide access to tape units and disk repositories. Connectivity within the enterprise backup environment can be provided by multiple networks, including different types of networks. All in all, an enterprise backup environment may be a large and complex system.
A duplication request asks that a source data image be copied to a destination data repository. Because of the typical size and complexity of an enterprise backup environment, the nature of the I/O path between the source and destination may be very important to the efficiency of the duplication process. Conventionally, this demands that an administrator be cognizant of loads that will be running on each server in their system at any given time and schedule duplication of data to distribute the load across devices and media servers, which may be a significant burden on the administrator. Accordingly, improvements in the field would be desirable.